Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Normally, I Consider Myself A Cat Person

This morning I got up for the Terrier group run. When I woke up, I looked outside to see if it was raining. I couldn't quite tell from 11 stories up at Drew's apartment, but when I looked again, it definitely didn't look like rain. I never know if it's normal or not that even though I get really upset when it rains, I also sort-of wanted it to be raining so I could just go back to bed for a little while longer.

I walked over to the park and the meeting spot. Unlike the last time when I was at Drew's and went to the run, this time I didn't get lost in the park. Mostly because I walked down 5th Avenue the whole way until I got to 72nd Street. I didn't feel like chancing it and being late for the workout. Of course, when I got there, there was no coach! After we all waited around for about 5 minutes, we headed over to get started on the normal stride drills and warm-up. It was pretty surprising that there was no coach, but we managed to do a regular drill workout just fine on our own (0.6 miles, approximately).

Luckily, some people had checked out the Terrier website before coming to practice, so they knew we were supposed to do hill repeats. There was some discussion about which hill we'd use (Cat Hill or the grassy knoll by the Museum), but Cat Hill was the final verdict. One of the girls in the group said that the Sprint/Olympic group should do 30 minutes, the half-Ironman group should do 40 minutes and the Ironman group should do 45-50 minutes. So, we all jogged over to the base of the hill and started running.

On the first leg heading up, I was thinking that 2 minutes should equal 30 minutes because it was really not that much fun. And I really didn't feel like doing it again. Once we got to the top of the hill, we were supposed to jog back down and not cheat ourselves by walking down. Even though there were a few times that I probably would have really liked to walk, I did keep jogging. I will admit, however, that on my second or third time up the hill, I did stop and catch my breath while I counted to ten before jogging back down, but I don't think I cheated myself on that. Every time that I ran by that panther, I just thought to myself that I didn't really like cats that much, even though I own one!

Now that I'm able to look at the internet for myself, I see that we were supposed to do between 10 and 15 loops up the hill, depending on our training distance. I'm really glad I didn't know that at the time of the workout, because I ran up the hill 6 times in my 30 minutes. Well, technically, it was 29:22, but that was close enough for me! Including the jog over to the start, I went a total of 3 miles in 29:22 (9:46 pace). I actually feel really, really good about that pace because I definitely jogged rather slowly down the hills as an active recovery. Actually, it also makes me feel better about what turned out to be a slower pace on Sunday, because I knew that there was no way we were actually running that slowly and that it had to have been the stretching and walking that put us up to almost 11-minute miles.

Now, notice my max heart rate below. I was a little concerned when I saw that while I was walking home, since I thought my max heart rate should be 192 (220-28 [age]). However, I was just trying to research this a bit more on the internet, and it looks like women should do this estimate by taking 226 and subtracting their age. In that case, I'd get a max heart rate of 198, which makes me feel a little bit better. I'm still not sure that I'm getting all the benefits of training with a heart rate monitor and I'm fairly sure that I should do some more research on all of that, but perhaps next week I will have more time to do so.

1 comment:

Nice run! My heart rate shoots up really high on hill workouts too. Supposedly 220-age formula isn't really that accurate for individuals, even though it's a good estimate for a group. I found a post by Joe Friel that was quite interesting on the topic: http://trainingbible.com/joesblog/2009/03/heart-rate-and-training.html